Last week, Lisa Plassman was outside during school dismissal at Westminster Preschool in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, when a distressed parent approached her. As director of the preschool, Plassman is used to dealing with parents — but this concerned mother was a duck. And she wouldn't leave Plassman alone.
“I was talking to some parents, but this duck kept coming up behind me, and then walking away, and coming up behind me, and walking away,” Plassman told The Dodo. “I thought, ‘This duck is asking me for help.’ It was clear she was in distress.”
Eager to be of service, Plassman gave the duck her full attention. She noticed the duck was waddling back and forth from Plassman's location to a nearby drain.
“So I walked over there, and I listened, and sure
enough, there were little duck noises, little ‘chirp, chirp, chirps,’" Plassman said. "I looked down, and there were 12 tiny ducklings at the bottom of this drain, and it's a pretty tall drain.”
The ducklings had fallen approximately a dozen feet through a heavy metal grate covering the storm drain.
Plassman called for assistance from local first-responders who were willing to come — but it would be a bit of a wait as they attended to another emergency. “We were just worried, with this being so close to a neighborhood road, that something would happen to mama duck before help could come,” she said.
That’s when Plassman and her team used their quick thinking to help out the web-footed family.
“All the teachers came down and were all concerned,” Plassman said. “We thought, ‘We can do this, we can take care of this. They need help; we can't abandon them.’ We were determined to make sure that we saw this through.”
Plassman and several teachers managed to lift the drain cover, and Plassman, as the school’s director, decided she should be the one to descend the drain's ladder.
“A teacher ran and got a bucket and some gloves, and I climbed right in," Plassman said. "I was a little nervous going down into the hole, but more just hoping there were no spiders down there.”
"I just laid the bucket on its side and gently scooped all of the little ducklings in,” Plassman said. “They were trying to scatter a little bit as I was corralling them, but I told them, ‘Nope, everyone's coming out of this hole.’"
The team put the cover back on the drain and began phase two of their duck rescue after-school operation.
“We walked across our driveway area over to a nice grassy neighbor's yard, gently called over mama duck, released her babies from the bucket, and we stepped away,” Plassman said.
The team started videotaping what happened next.
“Sure enough, she just came right up, and the babies came right to her,” Plassman said. “All the teachers were teary-eyed, because, being educators that care for and protect young children all the time, we just feel like a mother's love is pretty universal, even amongst animals.”
The team let the neighbors know to keep an eye on the duck family so they’d be safe, and Plassman ordered a mesh drain cover so ducklings don’t fall through the slats again.
It was all in a day's work for the educators, whose mission is to change lives, and on this occasion, joined together to save some.
“It was so beautiful and touching,” Plassman said. “Clearly, this mama was happy."
